What an intense and real dream! I was pretty sure it was your narrative, then it almost sounded like a real story, and whew! It was a dream.

Maybe it’s not the “sympathetic terrorist” as much as a “human” one– their deed is so horrible, ugly, incomprehensible that the way to deal with them is to expunge every essence of human being out to see them as monsters. But they did not enter the world as monsters; they had parents or a parent, they played, they may have had short lived aspirations. It’s easier to write them off as monsters, but even these monsters are humans.

It may not help, but I was reminded of a movie (I had to look it up) I remembered- it is called “Paradise Lost” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445620/ It’s the story of two young Palestinian boys chosen to do what they have been training for, to be suicide bombers in Tel Aviv. It did a lot more to paint them as humans, and to see how they were slowly made into potential human bombs.